On the finite appeal of Bernie Sanders…

we're now into the last few days of
February 2020 at this moment at this stage in the unfolding of history it definitely seems that the political career of Elizabeth Warren is over whereas just a few short months ago she seemed to have pretty good odds of becoming the president United States her odds were about as good as Bernie Sanders there was a time a few years before that when Bernie Sanders himself actively promoted Elizabeth Warren as a possible candidate for president United States and I think there's no doubt that many people in the general public understood what Elizabeth Warren represented as being the same slate of policy positions as Bernie Sanders with a few select bullet points subtracted a few exceptions to the rule substituted there's no doubt that Elizabeth Warren was able to rise to such prominence as something less than Bernie Sanders paradoxically enough you can say that Bernie Sanders cast a huge shadow and then Elizabeth Warren's campaign was able to really gleam it was able to shine out in this shadow because a lot of people frankly were apprehensive that Bernie Sanders would bankrupt the United States of America a lot of people were apprehensive that Bernie Sanders claimed that he would completely decimate the Armed Forces completely decimate of foreign policy positions in Iraq Afghanistan Syria around the world would be you know would have disastrous consequences for the balance of power on planet earth and Elizabeth Warren did indeed offer many of the same Vica promises as Bernie Sanders but let's we could subtract away the radicalism of Bernie Sanders on foreign policy we could subtract away the radicalism of Bernie Sanders on you know DIF disassembling the military shall we say and we could we could put in a few sort of cautious words that she she wasn't as as game to bankrupt States in terms of profligate spending on new social programs new ecological and health care and education and what have you there was a little bit of hesitancy there now in terms of optics as I've mentioned many times in some ways what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were selling was the same product but with a very significant difference in packaging because in terms of domestic policy Bernie Sanders openly calls his product socialism whereas you may say Elizabeth Warren was packaging her version of much the same domestic policies as compassionate capitalism but she would use the c-word she would say she was a capitalist to her bones I think it's inevitable that when people look back at this period of time when they look back in the few months when Elizabeth Warren went from being a major contender for president estates to being totally discredited and discarded they will probably remember a series of isolated statements she made isolated gaffes isolated ridiculous things and that's a shame because I think there is something more meaningful here to reflect on both in terms of the limited appeal of Bernie Sanders and in terms of understanding what was the appeal of Elizabeth Warren now very much in the past tense so I was much more familiar with Bernie Sanders than Elizabeth Warren let's say 12 months ago now Elizabeth Warren was a pretty marginal fingered figure in American politics she had never withstood the same level of scrutiny that Bernie Sanders had withstood back in the year 2016 um you know again many people know Bernie's current political platform because he published a best-selling book explaining it whereas Elizabeth Warren had a series of rather slapdash amateurish policy statements put on the Internet you could say as blog entries and have to say I regarded that relatively positively I thought Oh it didn't seem that a committee of experts had written those policy statements her tagline was I have a plan for that her set of plans they really did seem to be things that she had written herself you know maybe sitting around the kitchen table and talking to a couple of friends or her husband or something about them before posting them but they really did have the kind of handmade amateurish quality to them that I felt kind of reflected well on her character like okay this is somebody who isn't afraid to just kind of set down her thoughts on a whole bunch of different areas of you know domestic political and economic policy and as imperfect as it may be put that forward on the record to be criticized and let's let's be real here they weren't criticized there wasn't a lot of scrutiny directed towards Elizabeth Warren she was able to come to so much prominence because she was thought of as representing the same list of policies of Bernie Sanders and less it was like UK so you think of what Bernie Sanders represents then you subtract a few key points and people for many many months of these debates they were not really scrutinizing Elizabeth Warren as such on her own terms they weren't really reading and criticizing her plans I still this day I've never once heard anyone in the media really discussing the content of those plays and when I was reading them which was a lot of work I thought wow what she actually represents in these plans is very alien from the world of kind of professional news commentary you know which tends to just react from minute to minute two things she happened to say in debates but didn't didn't seem to be based on doing that little bit of reading that little bit of digging now Elizabeth Warren as a personality became less and less appealing to the public as her tactics became more and more desperate so there's no doubt she utterly humiliated herself with this ploy of trying to present Bernie Sanders as somehow an anti-feminist try to present Bernie Sanders as opposed to a woman being elected president and that moment of her seeming to utterly lack personal integrity even if even if the particular comments being made were trivial or it was merely grandstanding for the cameras even if her gaffe was trivial in itself that became the trigger for an avalanche of criticism directed at Warren that really should have happened earlier in the campaign people on the left wing did not formerly want to examine what was wrong in Warren's record now the most obvious example being her claims about her ethnicity nobody wanted to sound like Donald Trump and criticize her for being a fake Native America and they faked Indian you know these kinds of things nobody wants it's just in in the poet society of left-wing households it wasn't something anyone wanted to talk about anyone to examine with that triggering event of this ridiculous attempt to blacken bernie sanders character and suggests that he is anti feminists or anti women's rights or something then that whole discourse opened up again yes but people also went back and look at the record of who she really was and many many issue issues she lied about her own past being in fact something of a republican it's rather more right-wing than anyone thought was people dug into the archives dug into her history of different political involvement before she became famous or noteworthy or before she appeared on television talking about financial corruption and reformed the banking sector these things that now define her her public image questions were asked and digging was done that should have been done on day one and as i say this only seemed to happen after we hit a breaking point now one interesting thing to know is that the lies that have discredited Elizabeth Warren are of a very different character from the lies that Bernie Sanders leads on and yes I did just say Bernie Sanders is a habitual liar and in a Machiavellian sense it may make Bernie Sanders a better politician it may to be fair here let's say something similar but Elizabeth Warren many people now complain that Elizabeth Warren accepts donations from millionaires and corporations and political action committees people have complained that Elizabeth Warren does not maintain the same standard of moral purity that Bernie Sanders maintains in terms of who he will and will not solicit donations from an engagement fundraiser okay but in a Machiavellian sense some people might look at that and think well it shows that Elizabeth Warren is willing to fight dirty she's willing to fight the win and maybe that's an advantage maybe that is not entirely a disadvantage okay in the same way I think there are some people who will recognize the lies that Bernie Sanders is telling and say okay maybe this is a guy who knows how to campaign he knows how to stay on message and he knows that making these promises and keeping these campaign slogans going in the mass media that that's something quite different from the merely technical policymaking analytical realm in which truth rather comes at a premium now with Edmonds said Bernie Sanders lies and lying they do seriously discredit him in my eyes in my own judgment I don't have any sympathy for someone who will stand on stage and say that wages in the United States of America have not increased in the last 40 years okay that there's been no wage growth in us it's America and then I hear people in the left wing of the media repeating verbatim the same claim and they don't do what you know Fox News might even do believe me I have no intellectual respect for Fox News okay if you think the problem with America if you think the unique problem with America is the lack of wage growth in the last 40 years why don't you put up a chart showing that why don't you put up a chart showing percentage wage growth year by year and not in isolation why don't you compare the united states of america for 40 years to japan over the last 40 years denmark over the last 40 years any mature western european economy you know we can't compare the dead states we're gonna china in the same period you can't compare it to cambodia okay how does the united states America compare to the United Kingdom alright the notion especially since say 1990 from 1990 to 2020 the notion that there has been this terrible paucity of wage growth and moreover that Bernie Sanders has to cure for that problem that Bernie Sanders is gonna solve that you know you tell me the policy that's that's gonna solve that in Bernie Sanders arsenal this is a lie of a sort very different from what Elizabeth Warren trades in and I admit I do find Elizabeth Warren's lies more psychologically disturbing but the lies told by Bernie Sanders may indeed be portentous of really grave problems to come if he comes to power or even if Bernie Sanders somehow loses this election I can imagine these lies still being very influential on the future of the Democratic Party the future of United States America frankly the future of Western democracy and in other countries around the world I've read the book by Bernie Sanders it's right over there on that table so you know I know his policy positions that perspective I listened to his lectures I also watch his carefully crafted public messages in YouTube videos that are on his own channel it alarmed me when I saw him lying really palpable provable lies in making his argument for the $15 an hour minimum wage and you know one of the reasons this is disturbing to me is why do you have to lie like it's such easy argument to make it's such an easy argument to make on the basis of truth or even just just sympathy just asking people to sympathize just ask people's insight just say hey look here's somebody who works in a coffee shop and earns only $8 an hour wouldn't the world be a better place if they earn $12 an hour or $15 an hour whatever whatever you want to say mm-hmm you know the specific claims made and again you know about the videos this includes you know carefully edited quotations from people put together from interviews in addition to just that the text of what Bernie Sanders himself proclaims the claims made about Amazon the corporation Amazon how much they pay their employees incredibly misleading and dishonest and easily debunked I did before even Jeff Bezos came out to challenge the numbers Bernie Sanders was presenting I just googled around and found guys this doesn't add up what Bernie Sanders is saying is really misleading here and intentionally so there's no way that could be a mistake and he did it again and again and again and again it's not something he said once and then forgot about this is a major propaganda tool he used what he was saying about Disney Corporation and again there's a very easy honest argument to make that Disney should pay its employees more but again the when you get into the specifics of the message and how he presents it and sure just to mention one more topping that was covered specifically on this YouTube channel the lies he tells on behalf of the dairy industry what what does Bernie Sanders have to gain from lying on behalf of the dairy industry you know I mean in a sense I mean if you're lying on behalf of Saudi Arabia in relation to the war currently being fought in Yemen which by the way is a big deal and nobody in the white Western English TV world seems to want to pay attention to and if Bernie Sanders is elected he says he's just gonna abandon all those foreign policy entanglements America's and ok you know whereas Elizabeth Warren doesn't make such extreme statements you know it's a question look okay when Bernie Sanders's asked vote about foreign policy is he lying is he lying when you ask Bernie Sanders the first time this includes in the debates by the way when he asked the first time so would you just walk out of Afghanistan you get a kind of waffling answer that indicates yes he's just gonna walk at me answer when you ask a more specific question and again you've seen this even in the debates if you can see this in interviews and so on to a specific question like well you know um Donald Trump recently was in negotiations with the Taliban and many people faulted him for that and the negotiations didn't do well and so and so forth if you were pressed in the United States would you negotiate with the Taliban would you hand over control of Afghanistan to tell them to call the reply Bernie Sanders gives to this kind of question to call it a waffle would be an insult to honest pancakes hey is Bernie Sanders lying about military and foreign policy or is he just making promises you know he can't keep alright does Bernie Sanders have the intestinal fortitude to stand by as the taliban comes and burns down schools and colleges offering education to women as the taliban destroys the democracy the system of elections the american people put billions of dollars into we're not debating now whether or not it would have been wise in the first place for America to spend those billions of dollars and kill virgins people the money was spent people were killed created democracy created educational institutions created hospitals and now do you want to hand back control that to the Taliban that's that situation we're in now right that's why that's why Obama didn't just walk out of Afghanistan and that's why Donald Trump didn't just walk out even though Donald Trump's election promises basically were that he was just gonna walk again in case your memory is too short remember that it's all drunk amazingly he was the anti-war candidate cuz you know Hillary Clinton was so pro war it was crazy all right look the type of lies I get from Bernie Sanders consistently and these include lies about economics and Social Policy some of them are the heights but the United States of America and some of them are lies about other countries abroad that he's favorably contrasting the United States to some of them are not what lies there just wishful thinking of such a childlike sort that I can't imagine Bernie Sanders believes what he's saying I can't imagine he thinks you can have a $15 minimum wage without completely decimating manufacturing in the night states America without completely wiping out industry and agriculture as we know it without having astounding impact across the board in the American economy without more jobs leaving the United States to go to Mexico to go to China and so on very very very very obvious and inevitable consequences I I do not know how it's possible for Bernie Sanders to offer free tuition to everyone in America in a manner so much more naive than the the Corbyn government in England sorry so Corbin lost the elections I shouldn't say that the Corbin government but in when Corbin in United Kingdom was promising to offer free tuition if you look at what the promise was it came with also a total restructuring and redefinition of how the universities worked where basically these would cease to be independent of private for-profit scam institutions he was going to create a national education service parallel to the National Health Service they already have United Kingdom so you know yeah if if all of the University Professors are directly employed by the federal government in the same sense that all the soldiers in the military are employed by the federal government yes then you can offer free tuition everyone if you have incredibly corrupt self-serving multi-billion dollar for-profit institutions if you have education starts the way it is now there are problems with taking an already incredibly wasteful incredibly expensive incredibly corrupt system and then removing the price mechanism from it it will only get worse and this is not a long term far-off distant problem you know what Sanders is proposing there it either entails many other fundamental reforms that are indeed socialist in character like creating a national education service or immediate total collapse and failure and wasting of billions of dollars you know huge huge huge amount of money as a pointed out Bernie Sanders continues to vilify Big Pharma pharmaceutical corporations and he blames these mysterious corporations and their conspiracy for why health care so expensive in America and he compares the price of health care in America to the price of health care in France and Canada he doesn't mention Scotland much anymore used to in the past Colin is another example Taiwan is another example Taiwan has single-payer health care alright true single-payer health care until one okay um never mentions that doctors and nurses are paid dramatically less in those countries I have a friend who's in nursing college right now he's so he's in the process of becoming a nurse you know there are levels to being a nurse he already was a nurse he's becoming a higher level nurse and his professors there they are all aware and they have discussed with him that if Bernie Sanders is elected medical doctors born less money nurse is born less money that this is a type of reform that will negatively impact their economic position and I thought that was interesting because when in the past I've talked about this I got a lot of stupid hate mail people writing in to me and saying oh well you should know this union of nurses supports Bernie Sanders yeah glad I'm glad to hear that but the real struggle here is not gonna be Bernie Sanders against Big Pharma as soon as it's clear that Bernie Sanders means lower wages for nurses you know then his struggle is gonna be with the nurses union it's gonna be with nurses and doctors as such and we're not having that debate now we're not having that discussion now cuz we're all just in dreamland where Bernie Sanders gets to make these promises to a completely uncritical audience completely uncritical mass media I mean look the vast media is critical but in ways that are irrelevant and meaningless I mean obviously I mean you know the way the mass media praises someone like Joe Biden you know tries to make budda judge into a credible candidate yes there's a sense in which Bernie Sanders is criticized but it is not a substantive detailed sense in this way of examining examining the falsehoods in the argument he's making nor is it looking at the knock-on implications for the economy as a whole the society as a whole if you were elected in four actually to attempt to bring about the reforms that he's promising look would the world be a better place if Bernie Sanders were president instead of Donald Trump yes would the world be a better place if Elizabeth Warren were elected president instead of Donald Trump yes this is setting the threshold rather low there are very worrying signs Bernie Sanders lies Elizabeth Warren in a very different way lies they are both somewhat Machiavellian characters they're both people of shall we say finite personal integrity and I am concerned I remember time when in England there was all this excitement over new labour the Labour Party and you know I should do a book review of it now there was a hit book does anyone else remember this the stakeholder society nobody really looked into who Tony Blair was they saw Tony Blair in the shadow of the hard left wing the Communists frankly he competed against they saw him in the shadow of people like Corbin although Corbin was a young man then you know the people like that before there's left they saw Tony Blair in the shadow of the incredibly unpopular Conservative Party of the recent past at that time and Tony Blair seemed like the answer to all our problems and no one even thought to question the extent to which Tony Blair was a religious maniac it's so much that now it's like the ethnicity of Elizabeth Warren left-wing people just don't want to talk about that they just don't want to talk about the fact that Tony Blair is the kind of guy who thinks that God talks to him in prayer and who converted to Catholicism the minute his prime ministership ended that he is someone who is guided by faith and it was really a faith based politician allegedly on the left wing there were really serious warning signs about Tony Blair's character and you know what it's not the case that Tony Blair made insane political decisions on the basis of a Ouija board or on the basis of having his answered prayer or having the Virgin Mary appear to him in a dream it didn't go that far it didn't there were really serious warning signs about who Tony Blair was and what political agenda he represented even in that book he published nobody wanted to hear it nobody wanted to see what was even written on the page and nobody even wanted to evaluate that man himself as such his character let alone his objectives and whether not achieve them so on and so forth very often in politics people choose a politician just because they want something new and something different Bernie Sanders and his peculiar brand of socialism it's something new it's something different I'm here to tell you if you do the reading if you check his factual claims if you just google around and check the numbers if you just think about it for a minute there are some red flags here there are in fact some warning signs